Emma-Jane Arkady
Spring and the blue bridge
It is an impulsion
when the weather turns to this, the surprise,
the breaking of spring and fresh
cool light and clean,
the air and the mind,
the taste.
The months had been dark, the long-cold,
the freezing and nights I was not
allowed out, and suddenly it was spring,
it was light after five and warm
enough at last to flog my racer up
to the Blue Bridge,
its curving leg-polished brick
hauling me in.
Dawn'd be there, gricing delighted
in freedom and the revs of a Growler
down from York, long trundled on the up
slow with loose coupled stock.
I can only describe it as love,
this hugged celebration of light
in the first of the evenings of countless ahead
as we counted trucks, pestered the man
in the shed and invaded Wigston Up Yard -
a garden of shunting engines and ground-frame levers,
cinder paths and the ballast that grew ever warmer.
I feel it today, would flog my racer, if I had one,
if there were a place to go,
a Growler to cop.
It is all gone now,
only the fading imprint
of warm blue brick remains,
the cinder path turned cold in its track, rebuilt
to a desolation of houses.
It is a cruel teasing, today, this taste of spring.
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